Ph.D.
Candidate
Department
of Economics
University
of California, Berkeley
Contact
information
Department
of Economics, UC Berkeley
508-1
Evans #3880
Berkeley,
CA 94720-3880
Tel:
516-359-9327
Curriculum
vitae
Fields
of interest
Primary: Economic
History, Labor Economics
Secondary: Development,
Econometrics, Public Finance
Job
Market Paper
“Land
Endowments, Child Labor, and the Rise of Public Schooling:
Evidence from Racial Inequlity in the U.S. South”
Download
Abstract: Black children born in the
U.S. South in 1910 attended inferior schools and received three fewer
years of education than their white peers. These racial
differences diminished significantly in the following three decades,
most notably in the Cotton Belt. Moreover, there was no major
federal policy targeted at black schools during this period. I
propose that the demand for child labor can explain these trends in
racial inequality. To test this explanation, I digitize archival
school district data and combine them with data on cotton
production. I argue that prior to 1910, the demands of cotton
crowded out black schooling in this region because (1) its land
endowments were conducive to growing cotton, (2) growing it was
particularly child-labor intensive, and (3) black children were more
frequently employed than white children. School boards under
invested in black schools as a result of the demand for black child
labor by both white landowners and black parents. I provide
evidence that black-white differences in public school quality in 1910
were larger in cotton-growing regions of the South than in otherwise
comparable non-cotton growing regions. I also show that most of
these racial differences narrowed during two periods: (1) the early
1920s slowdown of cotton production, and (2) beginning in the mid-1930s
when New Deal policy indirectly discouraged cotton share tenancy and
consequently suppressed demand for child labor. These results
suggest a reinterpretation of how institutions developed during the Jim
Crow era by emphasizing land endowments and child labor, which in turn
has consequences for black well being during the 20th
century.
Work
in progress
“Black-White
Differences in the Returns to School Quality and Adult Mortality in the
U.S.”
Download
Prospectus
Abstract: Black-white differences
in adult
health have narrowed
significantly in the U.S. over the past few decades.
Underlying this disparity are
racial differences in education. In
this paper, I estimate the extent to which
the early-20th century
reduction of
the black-white gap in school
quality in the South accounts for this racial convergence in health. I
first formalize health as a function of
school attendance and the returns to education, both of which depend on
the
quality of education available. I
then
estimate returns to education by instrumenting school quality with
cotton
prices and New Deal policy.
These
instruments show why demand for child labor fell, and in turn, why
investments
in black school quality rose.
I use
census microdata to construct synthetic cohorts by race, and link each
one to
the quality of schools available when they were children.
The schooling data come from
archival
reports of education that I digitize.
This paper complements a
larger literature on assessing the most
cost-effective child policy for improving later-life well being, and
more
generally, the long-term effects of early-life
shocks.
“Agriculture
and the Labor Market for Teachers in the United States., 1900-1950”
“Prosperity,
Female Labor Supply, and Fertility: Origins and Persistence of the U.S.
Baby Boom”
Teaching
References
Prof.
Kenneth Chay (principal advisor), Kenneth_Chay [at] brown.edu
Prof.
Barry Eichengreen (principal advisor), eichengr [at] econ.berkeley.edu
Prof.
Robert Margo, margora [at ] bu.edu
Prof.
Edward Miguel, emiguel [at ] econ.berkeley.edu